#74 Melinda Carbis-Reilly: The Power of Kundalini
Johnny Burke: Welcome to Closer Venus, I’m Johnny Burke. Today’s guest is Melinda Carbis Reilly. She is a Reiki healer, Kundalini Yoga teacher, and spiritual coach. Today, we will be talking about her book Becoming; a tale of three women from different worlds and how these entangled souls collide on pathways transcending multiple lifetimes. Melinda, welcome to the show.
Melinda Carbis Reilly: Thank you so much for having me, Johnny.
Johnny Burke: Very interesting background you have, the Reiki, the Kundalini, how did you find yourself on the path as a Reiki healer, and a Kundalini yoga teacher?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: Yeah, it was really my spiritual journey that started around the age of eight because I had a beautiful father that taught me lots of meditative practices from a very young age. Of course, I was a natural, normal teenager that I sort of came in and out of that spiritual energy, but I also was very much of the world and experimenting.
It was when I was 20 and I started my career in fitness and Pilates that I was getting quite frustrated that it didn’t feel like it was the answer for everybody just working on that physical plane. So I kept asking questions about how can I actually help people? Because teaching them how to do a couple of bicep curls, isn’t the answer, it doesn’t help us feel happier. So I kept inquiring and inquiring, and then it was more that I was led, I guess because I was asking the questions, well, what can I do? And I kept trying to research and I felt like I kept coming to dead ends.
I had a girlfriend when I was going through my divorce in my late twenties, she said to me, “you need to go see my Reiki practitioner.” And I was like,” what is that?” And so she’s like, “you’ll love it, you’ll love it”. And so when I went to see that Reiki practitioner, she actually sat me down. So mostly you go straight onto the table, then they’ll introduce themselves and make you feel comfortable of course, but this reiki practitioner sat me down and she said, “you’re not here for what you think you’re here for”. And I was like, “what?” Yeah. She said, ” I had a dream last night of you I saw you. And I’m here to show you that you have healing hands and this is your pathway- you need to learn reiki healing. “
Johnny Burke: She had a dream about you?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: The night before I arrived,
Johnny Burke: Had you met this woman before?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: Never. Never, a girlfriend referred me. And I didn’t even mention the girlfriend when I rang to make the booking. That was quite dubious about how it all worked. And she said”, I had a dream about you last night and your spirit guides came to me and they said, this is the pathway for you. You’ve been seeking answers. And here it is.” so it was really….. I had goosebumps also a bit nervous, she sort of guided me to this pathway of Reiki healing, and I felt it so powerfully.
When you go through the teacher training, you have an initiation where after you’ve learned a lot about what Reiki actually is, and you’ve practiced on each other, you then get an attunement, they call it, where they come over you and they pass through you the energy. And there are lots of forms of Reiki. But the one we know now is as Usui Reiki, that’s what most of us practice. Based in Japan. And so that’s the lineage and it’s believed that as Usui Reiki, passed it on to some of his master teachers and then they passed it on. So as his lineage of this energy being transferred from one generation to another. When I went through that experience, I looked at my hands and I could see almost like glitter in my hands and all over my hands and sort of extending out past my hands. It was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had.
Johnny Burke: It looked like glitter?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: Glitter. Yeah, like it was coming out of my hands and just sitting and elevating just above it. It was quite bizarre because I was still very new to this. And like most of us, when you start to experience the unseen world, you doubt yourself, you think you’re going crazy. You need a number of experiences before you actually believe it. That was what happened to me. I just kept thinking this can’t be real. This can’t be real, but the experiences kept coming. So that was my pathway.
Johnny Burke: interesting that you used that word. it seems like the Reiki, which has its roots in shamanism, energy healing. There’s definitely a pattern where Reiki seems to be like an entryway for many intuitives to really fully step into that world. Do you find the same thing?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: Yeah, I think it takes a lot of faith to move through it and reassurance. I believe that the universe does continue to reassure you so you stay true to the path. There was one time I was practicing naturopathy -I’m also a naturopath and I was doing iridology where you look into someone’s eye. As I was looking in her eyes, to look for the markings to see what was going on in our life. But as I was doing it, this voice just said, ask her about her car accident. I was sort of taken aback and sometimes you doubt it because you think you’re gonna make a fool of yourself.
And I thought I’ve got to ask her” what, about your car accident? “And she thought I saw that in her eyes through iridology, but it was a clear voice about a car accident. And she was like, “yeah, that was the….” and she started crying. That was the turning point of this downward spiral that she slid into in her life. And had I have not received that message, my practice wouldn’t have been as powerful. I would have just looked for markings. I would have really only skimmed over the surface of being able to help this person. Because if you can’t see the roots of where your issues are coming from, you can’t uncover and then help them heal themselves. so it’s been quite powerful.
Johnny Burke: Would you, say that your work, a lot of it has to do with reading someone’s energy?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: Oh, Absolutely.
Johnny Burke: That’s what I thought. Let’s talk a little bit about Kundalini yoga. What attracted you to that?I often hear Reiki and Kundalini in the same type of conversations, what might be the connection between the two?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: What attracted me to Kundalini yoga- I’d been practicing, regular yoga. Hatha Yoga, powerflow Yoga, or the ones that are a little more mainstream. Kundalini is still in its early days in Australia. I know America has embraced it for a lot longer than we have. So it’s still very fresh here.
I practice traditional yoga, and, I love it. I still love it to this day, but I was introduced to Kundalini yoga through Gabby Bernstein, who you might know, an American author. I listened to a podcast. She talked about Kundalini yoga. Then when I did my first practice, I had another really amazing experience. I was just doing it out in the garden and I saw the face of this Indian man come to me. And then I saw these flashes of all these great leaders that have been before on this earth. And I just had this tingling sensation all over my body and it was a profound experience that I’d never had from Hatha or flow or power yoga. I’d never experienced that intensity before. So that of course inspired me to continue to practice and to learn more and then become a teacher in that yoga.
Johnny Burke: What you just described sounds similar to a shamanic journey where the spirits or whatever you want to call them, come out. And it seems like you’re looking for that energy, right?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: Absolutely. Yeah, I think when you just open yourself up that is really the beginning of these journeys that we can embark on is having that openness to receive. And I always try and avoid the word esoteric because it can make it sound quite exclusive that these experiences are only for certain people. so I try and avoid that term as often as I can. It still comes out because I believe they’re for everyone. I think that we can all have these experiences. It’s just an openness to receive.
Johnny Burke: Definitely a good point. And I’m hearing that more and more as well. These spiritually transformative experiences are not just for a select few special people. everyone can have them. Now, we’re talking about Kundalini, a Kundalini Awakening– can that connect you to your soul in a deeper way, and otherwise to the unseen world?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: The Kundalini awakening experience is very unique for each person. I believe you experience what is required for you to continue on your journey of growth. You need to be primed for the Kundalini experience. There are many cases of people moving into that Kundalini energy before they’re ready, and then having psychiatric conditions because their body hasn’t been primed for it.
In traditional science terms, the Kundalini energy is like a reservoir of energy that resides at the base of your spine. And in science terms, we would call that your spinal fluid. And what we’re aiming for in a Kundalini awakening is for, that fluid, that reservoir to rise up through the spine and it actually coils around the spine two and a half times before it reaches up through the brainstem and pumps into the pineal and pituitary glands. Those glands secrete melatonin and they secrete fluids that help to stimulate and awaken parts of the brain that are otherwise dormant. And through that experience, you then awaken whatever it is you need to experience. So in the teacher training, they prime you, they get you ready, so you can handle that experience.
One of the things they get you to do after the Kundalini awakening is you revisit your birth. So they take you into this regression therapy where you experience yourself being born again, and you also experience your death. And you see the afterlife and you can see the lives that you had prior to this birthing experience.
What was fascinating for me is when we went back into that birthing experience, I saw the whole thing coming out of my mother. I saw the blanket I was wrapped in. I saw where my mom, my dad, and where my grandparents were. And after that experience, I got straight on the phone with my mum and I explained everything that I saw in absolute detail. Nan and Pop were the first ones to come, and they had to take me away because you were sick. And my mum was blown away. Even the color of my blanket was accurate of what I saw.
Johnny Burke: You actually had a past life regression- was that the.The first one you’ve had or have you had more?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: That was the first time I’d experienced a past life regression. I’d seen people that had explained my past lives to me, but that was the first time that I had it come from the inside.
Johnny Burke: Well, it’s interesting how that’s connected to a Kundalini awakening. I know that a lot of these modalities and approaches can all lead to the same source, but that’s definitely the first time I’ve heard someone talk about a Kundalini awakening, and then you were directed to do a past life regression. So these experiences -you’ve had quite a few; how has that changed your worldview and how you determine the line between fantasy and reality?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: And it’s a fine line. I think the reassurance of it has helped me. I used to think I was quite delusional, so I would walk down the hall at night after going to the bathroom and I’d see faces in the wall. And I would hear footsteps when I was a teenager and I’d hear footsteps coming down the hallway and I’d feel someone breathing on me at night. I just thought I was delusional. I thought that was what is going on with me? Why am I feeling like there’s people around me?”, but there’s not- I’m alone. It wasn’t until I kept receiving reassurance from different people that this is right for me.
Johnny Burke: I noticed that many intuitives report being able to sense or sometimes even see spirits, maybe even spirit guides at that point, when they’re, 6, 7, 8 years old. Did you have similar experiences?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: Mine probably arose when I was in my early teenage years. I wasn’t quite that young. My meditative practice started when I was young, but I was sort of learning the skills for opening up more than having those experiences. But I definitely felt that energy and had visions and my dad was very open and he was the same. He saw himself leave his body and he had a lot of experiences himself that he would share with me. So It was really nice to have that. I have a girlfriend who experienced seeing people that had passed away and her parents told her she was crazy. So she shut that part of herself down until she was in her thirties. So I was really lucky that I had a dad that was just as kooky as me that could help guide me.
Johnny Burke: He was encouraging you then instead of discouraging. which I’m sure many people have had. But it seems to me, even if those intuitive gifts are discouraged, eventually, they find an outlet one way or the other, don’t you think?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: Absolutely.
Johnny Burke: Sooner or later, and sometimes it’s later. I’ve talked to people that don’t discover their gifts until they’re in their thirties. Let’s talk about “The Becoming “. I love the description, karmic pathways, multiple lifetimes, obviously, it references past lives. So the experiences that we read about in the book, are they based on your experiences or is it just pure imagination?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: There’s some imagination in there, but it is a lot about my experiences. I started to write a self-help book. That’s how becoming evolved, it was another self-help book, but I felt like that market was overly saturated. So I decided to take my life experiences and create a tale in which I can express those and share those with people who were interested. So the characters have things that have I’ve experienced. And when you asked about my world view, I’ve entangled that into my world view, which is really to summarize, that I believe the universe or even just coming down to humans, we’re just one big picture and it’s been broken down into different pieces of a puzzle. And then we separated that puzzle and we’re all now our own unique pieces, but we still need to fit back together again to recreate that initial picture that we came from.
The book really is about that. It’s about these three women and they’re on completely different paths, two of them know each other, the other one, no one knows. And you’re following their stories and, how each of them relies on the other one to really become all they were born to be. So they entangle each other and some of the healing, karmic energy from past lives that they experienced together. And another has an ability to auto write which is something that came to me maybe about five years ago, the ability to autowrite. So the healing hands of Danny, and her mentor that she had to help her experience, that was another experience.
Johnny Burke: The karmic pathways and the multiple lifetimes, that sounds like these three women are in a soul group, and they reincarnate over and over again. So cool. It just is. So that begs the question; in your currentlife, do you recognize anyone was in any of your past lives?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: Yeah. I actually had an experience where I knew of a lifetime that I’d had, where I was in Russia and my sister suffocated me and killed me. I knew that that was an experience. And I had this longing of a man that I loved that never came back to me. When I was in my mid-thirties, I met a man and I knew straight away and he knew straight away -cause he was quite spiritual as well, that we had known each other in that lifetime. And we went to see someone to help us understand. And she said that he was my lover in that lifetime and he went off to war and he was stabbed in the shoulder and died of infection, and he has bad shoulders in this life. I stayed waiting for him, looking out my window for the rest of my life, waiting for him to come back to me and he never did.
She sort of affirmed that that was what I’ve carried into this life – this fear of people leaving. So I had that, experience. When I opened my wellness center, I hired this beautiful young girl, a very gorgeous soul. And I had a dream that she was my sister that had suffocated me. When I shared that with her, she said, “I feel like that’s true. I feel like that happened.” she had the knowledge that we’d known each other in another lifetime as well.
Johnny Burke: What is that like have someone say I think I have known you from another life?”
Melinda Carbis Reilly: That you’re not crazy. It’s very reassuring. It’s also pretty powerful: I don’t think we’re ever meant to understand, this crazy universe that we’re living in fully, or there would be no point to the human experience, but it’s nice to have those little snippets of insight Into how vast this realm is without us even knowing even a tiny slither of what’s really going on.
Johnny Burke: Right. in this case, based on your experience, it seems like reincarnation is pretty much a no-brainer.
Melinda Carbis Reilly: I believe so.
Johnny Burke: Okay. That’s what I thought. So. Now that you’ve seen part of the cycle, the birth, life, death, next incarnation, how has that changed how do you view things here on earth in your present life?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: It’s helped me to see that life is beautiful. I’ve had a lot of trauma going on in my life and I’ve suffered from mental health conditions as well. I slid into a deep depression, a number of years ago, purely from adrenal fatigue. I worked myself to the ground and slid into a very dark place. Even though I’ve experienced those moments of grief, loss, trauma, and mental health battles. I can now see all of those moments of struggle as a part of my story and my own personal evolution. So I think having that spiritual knowledge and experience helps me. I say to people, I don’t care if I’m full of it. I don’t care if I die and everything I thought was real wasn’t because it’s helped me live a better life and to see life as it’s just is. There’s no good, there’s no bad. It’s just an experience that I am having and that you’re having in order for us to continue to evolve.
Johnny Burke: I think it’s an interesting observation. There is no good, and there is no bad. Apparently these things do actually happen for a reason, for your evolution, for your growth. So you’ve seen different dimensions that not everyone here gets to see(at least not yet.) This reminds me- there are moments in the book where the characters are suspended in another dimension, but when they returned to their physical body they don’t remember all that happens. Why do you suppose that is?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: I believe that we have experiences, even when we’re having lucid dreams at night. Whatever it might be that you experienced. I think that we only bring back the knowing, because if you were in a coma and you were suspended out of your body and you had a guide there, and he was showing you all that is and all that ever was, and you brought all that knowledge back into your body. You remembered the guide, you remembered all the details. What’s the point of your life from there? You’ve seen it all. What do you do?
Johnny Burke: You have seen it all!
Melinda Carbis Reilly: What do you do from there? So I believe you come back with a knowing like you have this knowing of, oh, I know this now I know that I’m supposed to go down this path. I know that the way I was seeing myself with such disgust or judgment is not right. And I need to be more loving and I need to make the most of life because a lot of people come back with that knowing of, I need to do this differently. And I believe that’s the snippet that we’re only supposed to bring with us. We get this beautiful knowledge and flower of universal mind coming through us, but it’s just the bit that’s going to help us move forward that we keep on board.
Johnny Burke: So you remember just not too much. That’s what it sounds like. And of course, for those of us, myself included- that do not have that sense of knowing, it seems to me it’s very, very hard to describe.
Melinda Carbis Reilly: Yeah, incredibly hard.
Johnny Burke: Can you give us an idea of your work?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: I think the majority of people that I seem to attract these days are the people who are seeking. They’re usually at the start of their spiritual journey or a little on their ways. They’re trying to understand beyond that typical,” I need to be busy to feel valid.” They’re moving past life being where your day is just being this endless to do list and getting gratification from ticking it off. They’re starting to see that that’s not all that fulfilling. So it’s usually people that are starting to awaken to know there’s more. There’s more to this. There’s gotta be more purpose.
Johnny Burke: The word ,” awakening.” I think a lot of us are hearing that these days- awakening “, people are waking up” is another one. This seems to be happening everywhere; people are talking about Ascension and waking up. What do you suppose that is? And what particular phenomenon might that be tied to?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: Well, in Kundalini philosophy, it’s all tied in with us moving into the Aquarius age. So Yogi Bhajan taught us that as the earth spins on its axis, we slowly move a little off and closer to Sirius. It’s just another planet in our galaxy. As we move closer to Sirius, it helps us to see more clearly what’s going on. So in Kundalini philosophy, it’s that we’re moving out of the age of a patriarchy of there being power structures. And we’re moving into an age where everyone is equal. And of course, we have different strengths, but we’re equal in importance. And we’re moving into an age where we can see more clearly that the way forward isn’t really what we’ve been practicing in this last century. It’s not about the industrial revolution. It’s not about power, jobs. it’s about nurturing each other, nurturing the planet. So if you follow that belief system, it’s all to do with planetary alignment.
Johnny Burke: People have been talking about the age of Aquarius since I believe the 14 hundreds. I did ask this question in a recent, episode , Al and Jean Fike. Al is a medium, and we were talking about Aquarius and I said,” this is before my time, but you might remember a musical group called the fifth dimension, speaking of awakening, and they had a song called the” Age of Aquarius”, I think was the title of the song. And I thought, the fifth dimension; doesn’t that have to do with Ascension? And my question was “Al do you think that these people were onto something, or was that just a cool name for a band?” And his response was ” well, they probably dropped a lot of acid so maybe they did have some insight,” I thought it ” pretty funny as well.
Our culture has been kicking around that concept we are moving into a different state of consciousness. Do you think that state of consciousness did actually exist thousands of years ago?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: I believe we’ve been gifted with people like Buddha and Jesus and all those powerful, intuitive beings that came thousands of years ago. And some of them hundreds of years ago. I believe there’s always been the gifted who have come down to the earth. I believe they’re from a higher dimension, but they’ve lowered their frequency so they can reside here on earth and they can help teach us. So we can learn from their knowledge and they help to open the doorway for us to see a little more clearly for when we’re ready. So they might be there explaining something, but, they’re not quite ready for it, but as that knowledge passes down through the generations, we keep evolving. Those generations can then really embody the message that they were here to impart to us.
Johnny Burke: Thousands of years ago, five, six, 7,000 years ago- do you suppose there might’ve been civilizations that were living in 5 D where telepathy was actually very common? where intuitive powers were things that everyone had, do you think that actually existed?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: Yeah, I watched this really cool series called Spirit Science. And it shared a belief or an idea that we have been here before moving through these same processes before. And they saw the same science and technology being used on different sides of the earth, which to our knowledge, they didn’t have the ability to communicate and to share those ideas back then.
This series showed that the pathway that we’re taking is all revolving around us moving closer and further away from Sirius is that we go through these cycles and we get taller as we evolve. We can see that when you go to England or you go to those places that, they’ve got these beautiful old buildings and everything is tiny, like you have to duck down to get into hallways.
Johnny Burke: Right. But then there are other buildings where the archways are huge. A door opening is usually around seven feet, maybe it’s eight feet but there are buildings like that, which seems to indicate that these beings were giants.
Melinda Carbis Reilly: They believe the Egyptians, in particular, were very enlightened beings and you see all their statues, which are quite tall. Some believe that they actually were that tall. We used to walk around 10 feet tall and that was when we were more enlightened, and that’s when the pyramids were built. It’s something to think about.
Johnny Burke: It definitely is. So, you believe based on your experience that we are moving into a new age?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: And a beautiful age. Yeah. Moving into the bronze age from the dark ages and just starting to experience the tip of the iceberg of enlightenment.
Johnny Burke: That would be nice. Because the past couple of years makes me kind of feel like we’re slipping back into the dark age based on what we read in the papers and what we see on the television. So any advice for seekers who want to be enlightened, want to get to higher spiritual ground? What can energy healing and, your type of work, what can that do for them? what do they need to do about it?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: So the number one thing is just to be open and then I believe you’ll be guided to the right channel or the right healing modality that will really penetrate you most deeply. So just stay open and you’ll be guided. That person will come along and say,” Hey, try this.” For me, Reiki and Kundalini are very powerful, so the people who are guided along those pathways are my kind of people .
I’ve had people over the phone doing Reiki healing and they’re like , “Wow, oh my God, my back’s tingling! Oh my God, I can move”. And it can be that profound. Sometimes it’s more subtle. It’s a message from a loved one that’s passed,or it’s just seeing into some old wounds and bringing them to the surface So they can work on them. Every experience is different, but it truly is just about being open and then you’ll receive and not having expectations as well, I think is really important. Sometimes we hear these amazing mystical experiences and we put pressure on ourselves to experience it. And then therefore we’re in the ego-mind and we’re not going to experience them. So it’s very tricky to do, but letting go of that expectation of what should happen for you is, is quite important.
Johnny Burke: So it seems to me, the Reiki healing looks like a good entry point for someone that does want to experience spirituality , and be open to things. So, Melinda, thanks for joining us today. How can our listeners find more about you online?
Melinda Carbis Reilly: www.Melindareally.com.au is where you’ll find my books and my programs. And there are also lots of free things on there. There are lots of meditations and there’s a free recipe book and a bunch of things that can get people started with wherever they need to start.